A former colleague of mine has published a wonderful paper at PLoS ONE which is of high relevance to several Wikipedia articles. I would like to incorporate its first figure, and wonder whether we have a dedicated bot for the job. I know we don't import all PLoS images, but it could be nice to have a page where you can drop a DOI and the bot does all the rest: Uploads the largest version of the figure to Wikimedia Commons, adds its description, credits the authors, places a {{PLos}} template and notifies the participants of WikiProject Open Access that another useful figure is available. It could even wait a few months and then email the corresponding authors, listing all Wikipedia articles (across all languages) to which their figure has been incorporated, and how many times have these articles been watched since. A scientist who hears that her results have been read by hundreds of thousands of people is likely to see to it that her research is cited correctly, thereby improving the overall quality of the article, and hopefully getting engaged in contribution to other articles as well.

So, is there any similar bot at hand? If not, is there a programmer willing to realize it? Thanks, ליאור • Lior (talk) 14:03, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

Hi Lior,

thanks for the suggestion. There is no bot like this, but I am trying several avenues for large-scale upload of materials from suitably licensed scholarly sources:

A bot framework that automatically uploads audio and video files from the supplements of OA articles (cf. introductory blog post). We have not included image upload in this project as of yet, but a dropbox approach of the kind that you laid out could be added in once the main machinery works and if the developer has some spare cycles left.

Treating OA images as an ongoing media donation and using existing Commons bots (e.g. the GLAM-related ones) for that. A demo is being worked on.